Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  “But then they leave you, or they sleep with someone else.”

  “What’s the matter with that? You simply find yourself a new one. They’re not rare, I assure you.”

  “Because it hurts,” I said. “It hurts like the devil.”

  The signal changed again, and we charged forward. I clutched the side of the door until my knuckles turned white.

  Lady Alice glanced at my face and nearly drove the Renault into a lamppost. She straightened the wheels and set the brake, oblivious to the horns sounding around us. “Why, you poor thing. Is it that bad?”

  “Yes, by God. It is that bad. It is for me. It’s horrible.”

  She reached for my shoulders and drew me down into her scented lap, there by the curb, next to a shabby bar tabac and a florist putting out the last hardy blooms of the season. My tears stained her silk dress in large patches, but she never said a word about it, then or since.

  5.

  The next day was Saturday, and Johann picked me up as usual at six o’clock. By now, it was still quite dark at that hour, and chilly enough that I wore a thick scarf over my riding coat. The wind froze my cheeks. I stared silently ahead as the street unfolded in the glare of Johann’s headlamps, and I thought, I’ll have to tell him today. I can’t go on pretending.

  I would tell him when we stopped for his cigarette at the lower lake, and that would be that. This was the last time we would drive together like this, through the Paris dawn in his beautiful oil-black Mercedes, to the horses waiting at the Porte Dauphine.

  We stopped at our usual spot, near the lower lake. The sky was just beginning to lighten. Johann lit his usual cigarette and said, “Is something wrong, my dear? You are quiet this morning.”

  “I’m always quiet.” I watched him suck on the cigarette for a moment. His lips were thin, and when he smoked, they seemed to disappear altogether. I wondered what it would have been like if I had kissed him, if I had asked him to make love to me. I found myself regretting that I hadn’t. I turned my head, until he existed only in the corner of my eye, and said, “I’m going to have a baby.”

  He didn’t reply at first. I don’t think he even moved. He stared at the lapping water and flicked some ash into the grass, and after a moment he said, “I see.”

  “It happened at the end of August, when everyone had left. I was lonely and innocent. A very stupid little affair. I never saw him afterward.”

  He said, “Do you want to see this man again?”

  “No. Never.” On the lake before me, a pair of swans glided free from the mist, white against the black shore. “I found out he was married.”

  “I see,” he said again. He finished the cigarette and turned to me. His face was pale and stern. “You are in no condition to finish our usual ride, I think. Let us return to the car.”

  We rode miserably back to the Porte Dauphine. Johann kept his mighty bay to a walk, a half length ahead of me, and I watched his upright back, the reddened plane of his jaw, and wondered if I would see them again. The trees thinned and the darkness lifted, revealing a heavy layer of autumn cloud that obscured the chimney pots of the emerging buildings. The air was damp and cold and smelled of smoke. When we reached the groom, Johann jumped off his horse and helped me dismount.

  We had driven several minutes before I realized we were heading in the wrong direction. “I thought you were taking me home,” I said.

  “I thought we might go to my apartment instead, where we can have breakfast and discuss what is to be done.”

  “There is nothing to be done. I’m having a baby in the spring. I suppose my father won’t turn me out; it’s not as if he has any ground to stand on.”

  Johann said nothing. The smell of exhaust, the movement of traffic was turning me a little sick. We arrived at the avenue Marceau, and Johann helped me out of the car and up the stairs to the louvered double doors on the second floor. We went to the study, and Johann asked the housekeeper for breakfast to be brought on a tray. He led me to the sofa and made me sit; he sat down next to me and picked up my hand and asked how I was feeling.

  Numb, I thought.

  “Well enough,” I said.

  “You must take good care of yourself,” he said. “It is an important business, having a baby. There is a new life to be considered.”

  “Yes.” I said the word without really meaning it, because I still hadn’t translated this state of being—pregnancy—with a living baby. The one didn’t seem to have anything to do with the other. I couldn’t conceive that there was a human being growing inside me: my child, Stefan’s child.

  Johann patted my hand. “Good, good.”

  “You’re being very kind,” I said, looking down at our linked hands. “I don’t deserve your kindness. The father—”

  “Shhtt,” he said sharply. “You are not to speak this blackguard’s name. You are not even to think it. From now on, as far as I am concerned, as far as you and the world are concerned, I am the father of this child.”

  My head snapped up. “You?”

  “Yes, Annabelle.” He kissed my hand. “You are, I think, in need of a friend, a devoted friend. A husband.”

  “Husband?” I said stupidly.

  “Forgive me. I am not elegant with words, as some men are. I am not skilled at wooing. But I have wished for some time to marry you, Mademoiselle de Créouville, and I think perhaps the earlier this service is performed, the more convenient it will be.”

  His words reached me from a distance. When I tried to breathe, the air was too thin. I said, in a voice so faint it couldn’t possibly have been mine, “You can’t be serious. I’m carrying another man’s child.”

  He shook his head. “If we marry, Annabelle, the child is mine. He will have my name, he will have a home and a father and four doting brothers and sisters. God willing, we will give him more of them, in time.”

  “But your own children. A stepmother. They will hate me.”

  “On the contrary, Frieda will be delighted. She adores you. She has in fact been hinting to me, and not too delicately. The others, I suspect, have long wanted me to find someone to cheer me a little.”

  “You are mad,” I whispered.

  “No, I am not mad. I have never been so clear in my objective. I am in love with you. I have been consumed with you since I first saw you in your father’s home, playing your cello for a roomful of people who were not worthy to hear you.”

  “Johann, stop,” I said desperately.

  “I realize I am not a handsome man, nor a charming man, but you will find me a faithful and devoted husband, my Annabelle”—he kissed my hand again—“if you will allow me that honor. You are weeping.”

  “I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve your kindness.”

  “It is not kindness, Annabelle. I am taking gross advantage of your situation to win the hand of a woman to whom I could not otherwise aspire. Now relieve my anxiety and tell me you will marry me.”

  He didn’t look anxious. His large face had taken on color, and his eyes were bright, but his expression had hardly changed at all. My pulse clicked in my ears, my head rang. Marry him. Marry Johann. Safe, stern, faithful Johann, who had no hidden wife, no mistress. Johann, who loved me so much, he would take my shameful baby, too. I stared at his pale bright eyes, washed free of color, and I knew I would never catch Johann in bed with Peggy Guggenheim. I would never walk into a party and count a dozen other women he had slept with. Imagine that, a lifetime of secure love, a houseful of children and loyalty. Between myself and the cautionary tale of my mother’s life, I would have Johann standing in protection, a reliable giant.

  I had spent the last few weeks half expecting him to propose, half preparing to reject him, half preparing to accept him, and now that the opportunity had arrived, at the exact moment I had thought it lost forever, I didn’t know how to reply. I stammered a helpless cliché: “I don’
t know what to say.”

  “You must say yes. You must. You have no choice. I am determined, Annabelle.”

  “Then yes,” I said recklessly, and a wave of shock passed across my stomach. Marry Johann. I pulled my hand from his grasp and reached up to snatch his face between my palms, so I wouldn’t be afraid of what I had just done. Who could be afraid, when Johann von Kleist stood between you and the world? “Yes, Johann. I’ll marry you.”

  I crashed my lips into his, and the violence of his response made me gasp into his mouth. He seized my shoulders and stood, lifting me with him, holding me against his chest while he kissed me. The blood roared so loudly in my ears, I didn’t hear the knock on the door, but Johann did. He set me back on the floor and took up my hand, and he told the surprised housekeeper to congratulate him, because Mademoiselle de Créouville had just agreed to become his wife.

  6.

  We were married the following Saturday, first at the German embassy by the ambassador and then at the Mairie de Paris, where our papers were properly stamped and the marriage made official. My reeling father attended, and a delighted Lady Alice, and all four of Johann’s children, along with his sister, who had traveled from Berlin. Charles had still not returned, and nobody knew where to find him.

  Afterward, we all had dinner at the Ritz, where Johann and I were to spend the night before leaving on our wedding trip to Rome. I sat between the two oldest children, Frederick and Marthe, who were perfectly friendly, if perhaps stiff. I couldn’t blame them. Had their father given them any hint that he was thinking of marrying? Or had they just received telegrams at school, and the necessary train tickets to Paris? Frederick liked to play sports and ride like his father; Marthe was fond of tennis and books. They had been to Florence last summer with their father to see the art and enjoyed it very much, but their favorite part was when they woke up at dawn and drove to Siena for the Palio. One of the jockeys had fallen off, not fifteen feet away from where they were standing, and had nearly been killed. Frederick described this scene with vigor, using the salt and pepper to illustrate the various positions. I stared at his moving hands and thought, My stepson.

  My father drank a great deal to overcome his shock. He gave a splendid toast and remarked on the absent Charles: He will now think more carefully before leaving town without a forwarding address, eh? Everyone laughed. Johann also rose and gave a brief toast, thanking everyone for attending on such short notice, but at his age one had lost the patience for a long engagement. He thanked me, his new wife, for the favor of marrying him, and he promised to make my happiness the study of his life.

  We had a small but elegant white cake. Johann’s half-English sister Margaret took pictures of us cutting it. When everyone finished, she shepherded the children to taxis, though not before lining them up to kiss their father and their new mother good-bye. The scent of sugar hung behind them. My father and Alice left shortly after that.

  7.

  As a surprise, Johann had booked the legendary Imperial Suite for our wedding night. It was only seven o’clock, but the November sky had already been dark for hours, so the evening felt much later.

  We hadn’t kissed since the moment of our engagement. There was too much planning to be done, too many logistics to be sorted out. We had not had five minutes for romance, and Johann was, after all, an orderly man, who wanted to wait until our union was properly sanctioned. Now the plans had been executed, the logistics completed. We were man and wife, and there was nothing to do but to be married.

  At the door to the suite, Johann bent down and lifted me into his arms to carry me across the threshold. I gasped at the opulence of the rooms. There was a bucket of champagne on the table in the drawing room, next to an enormous vase of fresh red roses, just opening and deeply fragrant. Johann opened the bottle and poured out two glasses. We drank to each other. Johann set down his glass and lit a cigarette with quick, nervous fingers. I had never seen him nervous. The understanding of his anxiety calmed my own jumping pulse, my panicked blood. I took his hand and asked him to show me the other rooms.

  We saw the dining salon, the marble bathroom, the guest bedroom. We arrived at the splendid master bedroom, gilded, hung with silk damask, where the imperial bed confronted us, as wide as the ocean. I began to shake again, because it was done, there was no turning back: I was now irrevocably the wife of Johann von Kleist, and in a moment he was going to start kissing me, he was going to start making love to me. That was his right as my husband. A man who wasn’t Stefan was now my husband. A man who wasn’t Stefan was going to make love to me, consummating our marriage, and without the least warning a cry of grief ripped the interior of my lungs, like a cat clawing for escape: a cry of what in French we call agonie, because it was November and August was gone forever.

  I must put August out of my mind, as if it didn’t exist.

  Johann took my champagne glass from my hand (it was only half finished) and set it on the bedside table next to his. He put out his cigarette in a small gold tray shaped like a seashell. He removed his splendid dress uniform jacket and hung it carefully in the wardrobe, and then he drew me into his enormous arms and kissed me, without uttering a word, and I thought, It’s better this way, it’s better that we don’t say anything at all.

  8.

  It seemed almost silly, afterward, to fall asleep in bed together at the absurdly early hour of eight-thirty in the evening, though it would have been equally silly to rise. It was our wedding night, after all.

  Johann climbed out of bed to fetch his cigarettes. When he returned, the mattress bowed to his weight, and I rolled helplessly into his side. He smoked for a while, without speaking, and finished his champagne. I fell asleep to the sound of his breathing and woke at eight to find my husband fully bathed and dressed, having already ordered breakfast, which was laid out neatly around a vase of fragrant gardenias on a table next to the bed: the start of our married life.

  Pepper

  COCOA BEACH • 1966

  1.

  Pepper screams. Not because of the headlock, but because a current of pain has just thundered up her foot like an approaching freight train, and then slammed into her brain in a cataclysmic explosion, like you see in the movies.

  Without warning, the arms drop away, and Pepper staggers face-first onto the oriental rug.

  “Jesus!” the man says. “You’re pregnant!”

  The lamp flashes back on. Pepper rises on her elbow and clutches the top of her foot, encased in its slipper. Already a bubble of numbness is forming around the pain, an ominous sign. “Holy fuck,” she whispers.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “You just broke my foot.”

  “I didn’t break your foot!” He crouches down next to her and lifts her hand away. “Oh. Jesus. Ouch.”

  “I’ll say.” An unfamiliar pricking sensation surrounds Pepper’s eyeballs, like she might—please, God, no!—actually cry.

  “Can you wiggle your toes?”

  Pepper tries. “No.”

  “Damn it. I guess it’s the ER. What the hell did you do?”

  “What did I do? You were the one who grabbed me in a headlock, sonny.”

  “You were the one lurking behind the door in my mother’s study, about to clobber me! In the dark!”

  “I thought you were a burglar!”

  “Me? For all I know, you’re the burglar.”

  “Oh, you’ve got a nerve. Do I look like a burglar to you?”

  Pepper lifts her head, tosses back her hair, and gives him a gander, just to make her point. And . . . well. Not quite what she expected, is he? Big young man, broad shoulders, dark hair, strong face, cranky eyebrows. Annabelle’s son? Not that she cares. Not that it matters whether she cares, because in that instant of connection, right before her eyes, the cranky expression transforms to astonishment.

  “Jesus. Pepper Schuyler?”

  She fr
owns, or rather deepens her frown. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

  His hand falls away from her foot. He looks at her face, blinking a little, as if to clear his eyeballs of her image and replace it with one he likes better. “I guess not,” he says. “All right. You sit here, I’ll get some ice.”

  “I’m not just going to sit here and wait for ice.”

  Annabelle’s son rises to his feet and stares down at her. “Well, Miss Schuyler. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’d say you don’t really have a choice.”

  2.

  “So how exactly did you hurt that foot?” asks Annabelle’s son, as they drive to the hospital through the dark Florida night in the same Ford Thunderbird Pepper drove earlier that evening. Except that Annabelle’s son has put the top back up, and her hair is quiet about her face.

  “Because you stepped on it, you big ox.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Pepper sighs. “It was the thing I was about to hit you with.”

  “What thing was that?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark. Some sort of statue on the bookshelf. I dropped it when you grabbed me.”

  He starts to laugh. “You were going to hit me with Mama’s Grammy?”

  “Her what?”

  “Her Grammy Award. A music award. She’s a cellist. You know, plays the cello.” He motions with one hand, a fair bowstroke.

  “I know she plays the cello. Obviously.” Pepper speaks with dignity, and tries to ignore the rich quality of his laughter, which would be far more attractive if she weren’t holding a bag of ice to her throbbing foot, thanks to his existence on this earth. She adds: “We’re friends.”

  “God, I hope so, or I’ll have to have you arrested for trespassing.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t that be rich. Considering she practically kidnapped me and dragged me to her lair.”

  “Oh, really? Sounds like Mama, all right.”